Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A leadership crisis in the Nix community

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 286 posts

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#171

Post by marginalia_nu »

dwb wrote: post #160
marginalia_nu wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you deal just with ideas and somehow separate them from the people who promote them, what mechanism do you propose to use to decide whether an idea is rooted in bigotry or fascism? The accusation is incredibly nebulous and can be used to derail almost any proposal. For the sake of argument, let's say I put forward the charge that the policy itself is rooted in bigotry. Can you prove that it is not?

Of course not, but asking for a "proof" for a question like that is a category error. It will be decided by whatever the group decision process is, which would have to be present for all the other non-trivial, and yes, fuzzy things that have to be decided, both technical and social.

Ok, let's pretend you're on the committee and you have dismissed my accusation that the policy is bigoted.

My next move is to publicly accuse the committee harboring fascist sympathies. Your voting record is undeniable, and I am just appalled this stuff can go on in the 2020s and demand the committee is replaced with people who does not hold these bigoted beliefs.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#172

Post by ParetoOptimal »

rgrmrts wrote: post #124
cycomanic wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software licencing is also completely irrelevant here, nobody said that Anduril can't use Nix. The issue was that the community largely did not want them as sponsors. There is a very big difference to allowing someone (or some company) to use your software and wanting to participate in a conference where the same company is a sponsor.

I honestly don't understand what objecting to them as a sponsor does. Sponsorship benefits the project for everyone. Is the objection to both the sponsorship and their presence in the conference? Folks who don't want to engage with them at the conference can simply not engage with them. Also AFAIK one of the conferences objected to their presence, so they weren't able to have a booth there. Individual participants ar…

People don't want Anduril to benefit from the NixOS they work on via publicity or association.

Most wouldn't have a problem with Anduril donating and asking for no sponsorship or other benefits in return.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#173

Post by tempaccount420 »

dzogchen wrote: post #56
aredox wrote: post #9

The main reason for the persistence of Nix despite its warts and general mess is just "first-mover advantage": it was the first, therefore it has more libraries/packages/development of the ecosystem than the alternatives. Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with Nix. Guix or any rewrite as a library in a well-developed language* makes more sense. *For example, wh…

The main reason for the persistence of C despite its warts and general mess is just "first-mover advantage": it was the first, therefore it has more libraries/packages/development of the ecosystem than the alternatives. Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with C. [Insert systems programming language du jour] or any other well-developed language makes more sense.

I see nothing wrong with this statement. Spice it up by inserting Rust at the blank and I can fully agree.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#174

Post by jonringer117 »

For those that are curious about an alternative perspective on this matter, I detailed much of my personal views in my reddit suspension post. I don't have much context on the EU NixCon 2023 events, but I've been actively involved with the project for 2019, 2020, 2021, beginning of 2022, and late 2023.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1cd5fod/in_case_im_u...

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#175

Post by tempaccount420 »

aredox wrote: post #9

The main reason for the persistence of Nix despite its warts and general mess is just "first-mover advantage": it was the first, therefore it has more libraries/packages/development of the ecosystem than the alternatives. Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with Nix. Guix or any rewrite as a library in a well-developed language* makes more sense. *For example, wh…

There is Tvix, a Rust implementation of Nix, and although it still uses the Nix programming language, I bet it would be a lot easier to replace it there than in the original C++ codebase. (not just because of the language of implementation)

https://github.com/tvlfyi/tvix

To me, the perfect solution would be to have a base like Nix/Tvix you can build on top of, for example to make a package manager for your language, and have the users of that language's PM interact with TOML or JSON.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#176

Post by steve1977 »

dwb wrote: post #165
steve1977 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these people are keeping a double standard, yes.

Are you ideologically aligned with the distant origin of everything you use and consume?

I try to be aware of these origins at least.

But we are not talking about distant origins here.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#177

Post by dwb »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #171
dwb wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not, but asking for a "proof" for a question like that is a category error. It will be decided by whatever the group decision process is, which would have to be present for all the other non-trivial, and yes, fuzzy things that have to be decided, both technical and social.

Ok, let's pretend you're on the committee and you have dismissed my accusation that the policy is bigoted. My next move is to publicly accuse the committee harboring fascist sympathies. Your voting record is undeniable, and I am just appalled this stuff can go on in the 2020s and demand the committee is replaced with people who does not hold these bigoted beliefs.

Gotta say, this scenario you're so intricately weaving doesn't sound like any open source project I've ever come across. I guess I'll continue playing. At this point it would depend on how many people agreed with you that the policy itself is rooted in bigotry. If it's just you, then this new accusation is going to sound pretty silly.

I guess you're trying to pull an example from history. I don't doubt that authoritarian regimes can get accusatory, and nonsense can spiral. But we're not talking about authoritarian regimes, we're talking about open source software projects. I don't buy that they're at all similar enough to make this kind of connection.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#178

Post by tempaccount420 »

thuuuomas wrote: post #71

Culture war grandstanding drowning out the much more interesting discussion around Determinate System’s pledge to support the long-debated Nix Flakes officially. Nix Flakes looking like the real source of the schism in the Nix community.

Flakes should be either stabilized, reworked or rejected already. They have been unstable for far too long, the damage they have caused the ecosystem is huge...

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#179

Post by mrguyorama »

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #62
ParetoOptimal wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> targeting "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry" Is targeting "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry" a bad thing?

When, for people pushing this targeting, fascism/bigotry means having a branch in your repo names master I absolutely believe targeting ideas rooted in fascism/bigotry is a bad thing.

Oh look someone brought a horse carcass to the party.

God forbid a single implementation of popular software change a default in a fairly meaningless way. Especially since the older term hasn't been accurate in software development for like a decade. Does anyone even ship/deploy the "master" branch anymore?

But no, while we should dislike these folks for saying "we don't want a military contractor to sponsor our event", we should 100% get behind "this private company changed a term and I don't like that so obviously they are wrongthinkers"

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#180

Post by dwb »

steve1977 wrote: post #176
dwb wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you ideologically aligned with the distant origin of everything you use and consume?

I try to be aware of these origins at least. But we are not talking about distant origins here.

So if you're aware it's ok? Where has anyone in this story shown themselves to be unaware?
Post reply on HN